It will not make sense, all the time
While I sold the actual product at a premium, customizing was an outsourced service that was out of my control. Finding a branding firm that would do a number of different designs daily wasn’t easy. Once I got one, I still needed to plan my orders around there schedule and suffer delays when there was an issue. The aspect of spoilt products due to branding mistakes was still there; so replacements were occasionally needed. A person needed to be constantly overseeing the process to ensure all runs smoothly to reduce losses. The costs were high and even though I was charging extra for this service, it almost never made a profit. It was a tedious process but it kept sales of the products that had a tidy profit, coming. It even got to a point that plain products were selling more than customized ones; so much so that the viability of the customizing service was in question.
This year, we expanded our product range and we thought it would be a good thing to drop the laborious customizing service and ‘embrace our new path’ as a normal online retailer of products. The results were immediate: sales dropped. We made an about-turn and reinstated the product-customizing service and things slowly came back to normal.
What I learnt: customizing the products endeared us to our customers. We were the company that sold them quality products that were customized to them. So they told others about it and they come to us to buy more. The customized products also provided us with amazing content for our social media accounts which gave us free publicity and new customers. This continues to be the wave on which we introduce our extended product range and the response has been amazing.
I had a chat with a friend who told me that a top engineering firm makes no money from the service projects it does but make a huge profit from the equipment they sell as part of the project. The service arm creates a reputation of a competent team that can be trusted to sell the best equipment.
On a personal note, there are things you do for people that may not make sense but somehow they bear fruit down the line. It comes back to you in amazing ways.
It will not make sense, all the time.
Everywhere you go these days, everyone is trying to measure the effectiveness, the efficiency and financial viability of everything they invest their time and resources in. It is amazing that more people and businesses are able to turn around their fortunes by focusing on the things that are logically beneficial to them. It is also interesting to note that this is not the whole truth; there are still activities that as a person or business that are integral to your business but do not make money or simply look like time wasters.
I stumbled on a business during the Covid lockdown that made me money mostly because I offered custom-made products. There are many big companies that sold similar products and all of them were cheaper than I was. My offer was that you could make it yours by customizing it to your liking and you would have it delivered fast. I made sales daily and they kept on growing.